ProsperWorks raises $53M for its G Suite-centric CRM service

ProsperWorks, a service that offers a set of Google-centric CRM tools, today announced that it has raised a $53 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from GV (the fund you probably still remember as Google Ventures).

ProsperWorks, a service that offers a set of Google-centric CRM tools, today announced that it has raised a $53 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from GV (the fund you probably still remember as Google Ventures). This new round brings the company's total funding to $87 million, which, in ProsperWorks' own words, makes t the "#1 funded CRM company in the last decade."

Exactly a year ago, ProsperWorks announced its $24 million Series B round, so investors are clearly very excited about the service. Asthe company's CEO Jon Lee told me, he wants ProsperWorks to be the #1 challenger to Salesforce. "We’re solving a huge problem that has massive implications for global productivity," he told me in an email. "CRM is a $40 billion market that drives over $1 trillion in sales or 5.5 precent of the US GDP. However, according to Forrester, 47 percent of CRMs fail because people don’t want to use it."

ProsperWorks has long seen it as its mission to make CRM systems easy to use and to help the companies that adopt its system to get value out of its service. The general idea here is to integrate deeply with Google's G Suite and to make the service look and feel like a Google product. This also means that its users don't feel like they are constantly switching context as they move between their different productivity applications.

ProsperWorks plans to use the new funding to double its engineering team to accelerate its product development and to enhance its service with new solutions for specific verticals. In addition, the team is also looking at expanding internationally.

What's maybe most important for current users, though, is that the company plans a full redesign. "We want to do for CRM what Apple did for mobility, reinventing user interface to be so intuitive that you realize value right away," Lee writes in today's announcement and also notes that the company plans to automate more of the standard CRM workflow by using the data it's gathering from its users to power its machine learning algorithms to make life easier for its users.